Record Store Day « Frequency blog: Music news and reviews from Bend and Central Oregon, by Ben Salmon

Posts Tagged ‘Record Store Day’

Today is Record Store Day!

Saturday, April 20th, 2013

Today is national Record Store Day, when CD/vinyl-peddling shops stock a slew of special releases — mostly on sweet, sweet wax — that have been been put together specifically for this day. Now in its seventh year, RSD is a celebration of local, independent record stores, as well as a chance for you to show your appreciation for those kinds of businesses with your wallet.

Bend has two such shops: Ranch Records and Recycle Music, though only Ranch is listed on the RSD page as an official participating store. But Recycle is definitely celebrating, too. Here’s a quick look at what each place is planning:

– At Ranch Records (831 N.W. Wall St.), they received more RSD 7″s than usual, so expect a big ol’ table of those somewhere, plus the usual bin of 12″s and 10″s. Ranch will also serve brownies and will make a bunch of old T-shirts from its stock available for free. They open at 10 a.m.

– At Recycle Music (3 N.W. Bond St.), everything in the store except new, sealed vinyl will be 20 percent off, and there will be food and drinks available. As for the RSD releases, Recycle got a few of ‘em, but they’ve also stocked up on both new and used records, and good ones, too. (I picked through some of their crates yesterday.) They open at 10:30 a.m.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s something I wrote a few years back about the importance of supporting locally owned and independent record stores. Every word still stands … well, except for the part about Boomtown closing last year. This was written in 2009.

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Tags: Ranch Records, Record Store Day, Recycle Music
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This week in GO! Magazine’s music section

Friday, April 20th, 2012

Tonight is a very busy night on the local music scene. There’s a ton of stuff going on, including two shows that’ll be pretty big (Yonder Mountain and Tipper/Papadosio), plus lots of stuff that’ll be great, just on a smaller scale. Here’s what we’ve got in this week’s music section in The Bulletin:

– North Carolina electro-jam band Papadosio is part of an enormous bill at tonight’s Slipmat Science party, which will also feature bass-music pioneer Tipper.

– The familiar faces of Yonder Mountain String Band will be back to acoustically rock a jam-packed Midtown Ballroom tonight.

– Local indie rock band All You All will celebrate its new EP with a show tonight at PoetHouse Art, where the bill will also include promising young bands Adventure Galley and Jaccuzi.

– The Thoughts will bring a quieter sound to The Horned Hand tonight than that place is used to, but that sound is really beautiful.

Elsewhere in the music section: The Quons host a songwriters’ showcase at Silver Moon and the Blues Amuse & Brews benefit for Westside Village Magnet School brings in The Autonomics, plus Third Seven, Crown Point, Jonathan Byrd and Chris Kokesh, and much more.

Also! Saturday is national Record Store Day, which has happened each of the past five years and is designed to celebrate the unique culture of independent record stores. My Feedback column is about some of my favorite shops, what they mean to me, what Ranch Records in Bend is doing tomorrow, and why you should support them.

Tags: All You All, Blues Amuse & Brews, Crown Point, Papadosio, Ranch Records, Record Store Day, The Quons, The Thoughts, Yonder Mountain String Band
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This week in GO! Magazine’s music section

Friday, April 15th, 2011

One of Bend’s favorite dudes, G. Love aka Garrett Dutton, is bringing the Special Sauce back to town on Thursday. This time, he’s supporting a more rustic, acoustic album called “Fixin’ to Die” that he made with Seth and Scott Avett of The Avett Brothers. I chatted with the man about his new musical direction.

“We thought of those last three records as a triumvirate,” he said. “With the economy and the state of the record business and everything like that — it being harder and harder to sell records — it was just like, you know what, we gotta do something really different. So we decided we were gonna go back to my roots as a coffee-shop singer and a Delta bluesman and really … go all the way with that.”

Enter the Avetts, a couple of North Carolina boys whose new-school old-time string band is at the forefront of the current roots-music revival. Once the G. Love camp decided on the direction of the new record, they set their sights on the ideal producers.

“They do things in such an honest way,” Dutton said. “We felt like (we should) go back to making records how I used to make ’em: real stripped down, live performances, no frills. Just good, old-fashioned, honest music.”

Sounds like Dutton was super-inspired by working with the Avetts. Click here to read the whole story.

In Feedback this week, I tell you how you can support your local music scene by supporting Bend’s local, independent radio station, KPOV and it’s local, independent record store, Ranch Records. And then I tell you why you should.

You see, places like KPOV and Ranch are vital to the uniqueness of a town like Bend. With them in place, interesting, different and/or obscure music can infiltrate our town and our ears, thanks to DJs and record store clerks who are as passionate about good music as you are.

Each is as important a piece of the local music scene as a punk club, a jam session or an exciting new rock band. And without them, our funky little town would be a lot less funky, and a lot more boring.

Funky is good. Boring is bad. The existence of KPOV and Ranch are good things, and their existence depends on your support.

I hope you’ll go read the whole thing by clicking here.

Elsewhere in this week’s music section: the wonderful Gregory Alan Isakov plays the PoetHouse, The Swingle Singers visit the Tower Theatre, Andre Nickatina returns to the Domino Room, Sapient’s back at MadHappy Lounge, Paleface comes to McMenamins and Silver Moon hosts Tone Red tonight and Boxcar Stringband Saturday. Solid!

Tags: Andre Nickatina, Boxcar String Band, G. Love & Special Sauce, Gregory Alan Isakov, KPOV, Paleface, Record Store Day, Sapient, The Swingle Singers, Tone Red
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Hear one of Empty Space Orchestra’s Record Store Day songs

Friday, April 15th, 2011

As mentioned in today’s Feedback column in GO! Magazine, tomorrow is Record Store Day, and Ranch Records (831 Wall Street, Bend) is celebrating with some special RSD releases, free giveaways and an Empty Space Orchestra show in the alley behind the store at 1 p.m. It should be a pretty cool day.

Props to Empty Space, too, for getting into the collectible, scarcity-obsessed spirit of Record Store Day by putting together a limited-edition two-song release that they’ll be selling for $5 tomorrow. Just a couple days ago, they were pushing to finish the groovy custom covers, shown by drummer Lindsey Elias in the photo above.

So, if you want those two songs, your best bet is to be at Ranch tomorrow around 1 p.m. If you can’t be there, though, the band was also nice enough to make one of the two tracks — “It’s Hard to Play Basketball in the Dark” — available for free download to Frequency readers! Stream or grab it right here:

Download Empty Space Orchestra, “It’s Hard to Play Basketball in the Dark”

As long as we’re on the subject of ESO, advance tickets to their album-release show on May 19 at the Century Center will go on sale at the band’s website on Monday. They’ll be $15, which also gets you a free instant download of the album. Also on the bill: Diego’s Umbrella and The Quick & Easy boys.

Tags: Empty Space Orchestra, Ranch Records, Record Store Day
Posted in cool stuff, mp3 download | No Comments »

This Saturday, celebrate Record Store Day!

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Hey, you at the computer! Do me a favor, OK? Minimize your iTunes and shut down your BitTorrent client. Let your CD burner cool off for a minute.

It’s time to talk about Record Store Day, a nationwide celebration of local, independent shops that’ll sell you music on (mostly) CD and vinyl.

Record Store Day is Saturday, and there’s one participating store in Central Oregon listed on the Record Store Day Web site: Ranch Records, located at 831 N.W. Wall St., in downtown Bend.

The store has a few fun things planned, according to jolly Rancher Renee Heister, who’s coordinating things. There will be discounts, including $1 off vinyl and $1 off used CDs. There will also be live music beginning at 2 p.m., with performances by local bands Yenn and Larry and His Flask.

And, of course, Ranch will have at least some of the releases that have been specially prepared for Record Store Day. There’s a whole list of those releases right here. Ranch won’t have all of those, but they will have some, and quantities are extremely limited, so you might consider showing up at 10 a.m. to make sure you get the pick of the litter.

I was going to write a long post about why we should all support independent record stores, but then I went back and read what I wrote last year, and I like it, so I’m just going to copy and paste part of it below. (If you want, the whole thing is here.) Every word still stands:

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Tags: Ranch Records, Record Store Day
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